Berkeley’s Stoic Notion of Spiritual Substances

Abstract

For Berkeley, minds are not Cartesian spiritual substances because they cannot be said to exist (even if only conceptually) abstracted from their activities. Similarly, Berkeley’s notion of mind differs from Locke’s in that, for Berkeley, minds are not abstract substrata in which ideas inhere. Instead, a mind is a substance in a way consistent with the Stoic logic of the seventeenth-century Ramists on which Leibniz and Jonathan Edwards draw. The Stoic character of Berkeley’s philosophy is recognizable only when we see how it is based on a doctrine in which perceptions or ideas are intelligible precisely because they are always embedded in the propositions of a discourse or language.